For the empirical, like the ant, only collects and uses; the rational, like the spider, spins from itself. But the practice of the bee is midway, which draws materials from the flowers of both garden and field, but transmutes and digests them by a faculty of its own. Nor is the work of true philosophy different. . . .
Bacon, Thoughts and Observations Concerning the Interpretation of Nature (1620)
Or consider Henry Adams’ discussion of grisaille – painting in shades of gray:
Grisaille is a separate branch of colour-decoration which belongs with the whole system of lighting and fenetrage, and will have to remain a closed book because the feeling and experience which explained it once are lost, and we cannot recover either. Such things must have been always felt rather than reasoned, like the irregularities in plan of the builders; the best work of the best times shows the same subtlety of sense as the dog shows in retrieving, or the bee in flying, but which tourists have lost.
Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904)
Where a human trait or behavior is ambiguous (it might be the expression of something high or low), comparison to an animal can distinguish the possibilities.
The few odd minutes I have had to spare I have given to Plato, recurring to his Symposium after fifty years; with a translation alongside I find the Greek easy. My successive reflections have been these: How natural the talk. But it is the “first intention” common to the classics. They have not a looking glass at each end of their room, and their simplicity is the bark of a dog, not the simplicity of art.
Holmes, Jr., letter to Frederick Pollock (1911)
6. Hybrid cases. Because animals and humans are superficially similar, it is easy to impute human qualities and feelings to animals – and then to turn the resulting picture around, with a person compared to an animal said to have certain of its (human) traits. In effect the animal is anthropomorphized, then compared back to the human to make the latter more vivid. Some cases of this kind involve human attributes assigned broadly to certain types of creatures.
His countenance had a strongly masculine cast; not properly human, but such as we see in the bull, the goat, or the domestic boar; something equivocal and wheedling, something greedy, brutal, and dangerous.
Stevenson, The Sire de Maletroit’s Door (1882)
Mr. Lush felt a triumph that was mingled with much distrust; for Grandcourt had said no word to him about her, and looked as neutral as an alligator; there was no telling what might turn up in the slowly-churning chances of his mind.
Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876)
He had a round face, too, like a walrus; and with about the same expression, half human and half indescribable.
Melville, Redburn (1849)
Human qualities also may be associated not just with a whole species but with a particular animal in a comparison – to invoke not the lowliness of the dog generally, but the more particular disposition of the dog that has been kicked. The conduct or inner state of the animal is described with words that normally apply to people, making the result partly human and causing the comparison to feel closer.
I told him, he was not sensible of the danger, having lain under cover in the boat during the storm: he was like the chicken, that hides its head under its wing, and then thinks itself safe.
Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785)
Don’t get the expression of a vicious cur that appears to know the kicks it gets are its desert, and yet hates all the world, as well as the kicker, for what it suffers.
Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847)
[T]he house of Smallweed, always early to go out and late to marry, has strengthened itself in its practical character, has discarded all amusements, discountenanced all storybooks, fairy tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever. Hence the gratifying fact that it has had no child born to it and that the complete little men and women whom it has produced have been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their minds.
Dickens, Bleak House (1853)
More extreme cases – not necessarily metaphorical, but in place here – enjoyably hypothesize what an animal would think or say if it could.
Somebody quoted to him with admiration the soliloquy of an officer who had lived in the wilds of America: “Here am I, free and unrestrained, amidst the rude magnificence of nature, with the Indian woman by my side, and this gun, with which I can procure food when I want it! What more can be desired for human happiness?” “Do not allow yourself, sir,” replied Johnson, “to be imposed upon by such gross absurdity. It is sad stuff; it is brutish. If a bull could speak, he might as well exclaim, ‘Here am I with this cow and this grass; what being can enjoy greater felicity?”
Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791)
In the two new volumes Johnson says, and very probably did, or is made to say, that Gray’s poetry is dull, and that he was a dull man! The same oracle dislikes Prior, Swift, and Fielding. If an elephant could write a book, perhaps one that had read a great deal would say, that an Arabian horse is a very clumsy ungraceful animal.
Walpole, letter to Miss Berry (1791)
It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.
Mill, Utilitarianism (1863)
7. Insults; loathsomeness. Many of the examples already seen have diminished their human subjects, depicting them as slow-witted or incorrigible. But we nevertheless should give further consideration to comparisons made more directly for the sake of insult and disparagement. Most insults are metaphors, as when the person made the subject of them is compared to an orifice or appendage. There is an old tradition, however, of abuse accomplished by comparisons to animal life; these devices allow the speaker to retain more dignity and use more imagination, and they have a distinct potency of their own. Insects are a natural source for the purpose, as they tend to be puny as well as odious.
You diversivolent lawyer, marke him; knaves turn informers, as maggots turn to flies; you may catch gudgeons with either.
Webster, The White Devil (1612)
If I am instructed rightly, he is one of those vain and vapid coxcombs, . . . one of those fashionable insects, that folly has painted, and fortune plumed, for the annoyance of our atmosphere; dangerous alike in their torpidity and their animation; infesting where they fly and poisoning where they repose.
Phillips, argument in Guthrie v. Sterne (1815)
If the Frenchman saw our aristocracy and liked it, if he saw our snobbishness and liked it, if he set himself to imitate it, we all know what we should feel. We all know that we should feel that that particular Frenchman was a repulsive little gnat.
Chesterton, French and English (1909)
Instructive applications to critics:
He will soon flit to other prey, when you disregard him. It is my way: I never publish a sheet, but buzz! out fly a swarm of hornets, insects that never settle upon you, if you don’t strike at them and whose venom is diverted to the next object that presents itself.
